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In an autonomous vehicle, the lane following algorithm is an important component, which is a basic function of autonomous driving. However, the existing lane following system has a few shortcomings: first, the control method it adopts requires an accurate system model, and different vehicles have different parameters, which needs a lot of parameter calibration work. The second is that it may fail on road sections where the lateral acceleration requirements of vehicles are large, such as large curves. Third, its decision-making system is defined based on rules, which has disadvantages: it is difficult to formulate; human subjective factors cannot guarantee objectivity; coverage is difficult to guarantee. In recent years, the deep deterministic policy gradient (DDPG) algorithm has been widely used in the field of autonomous driving due to its strong nonlinear fitting ability and generalization performance. However, the DDPG algorithm has overestimated state action values and large cumulative errors, low training efficiency and other issues. Therefore, this paper improves the DDPG algorithm based on the double critic networks and priority experience replay mechanism. Then this paper proposes a lane following method based on this algorithm. Experiment shows that the algorithm can achieve excellent following results under various road conditions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Wireless networking using GHz or THz spectra has encouraged mobile service providers to deploy small cells to improve link quality and cell capacity using mmWave backhaul links. As green networking for less CO2 emission is mandatory to confront global climate change, we need energy efficient network management for such denser small-cell heterogeneous networks (HetNets) that already suffer from observable power consumption. We establish a dual-objective optimization model that minimizes energy consumption by switching off unused small cells while maximizing user throughput, which is a mixed integer linear problem (MILP). Recently, the deep reinforcement learning (DRL) algorithm has been applied to many NP-hard problems of the wireless networking field, such as radio resource allocation, association and power saving, which can induce a near-optimal solution with fast inference time as an online solution. In this paper, we investigate the feasibility of the DRL algorithm for a dual-objective problem, energy efficient routing and throughput maximization, which has not been explored before. We propose a proximal policy (PPO)-based multi-objective algorithm using the actor-critic model that is realized as an optimistic linear support framework in which the PPO algorithm searches for feasible solutions iteratively. Experimental results show that our algorithm can achieve throughput and energy savings comparable to the CPLEX. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How to operate an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) safely and efficiently in an interactive environment is challenging. A large amount of research has been devoted to improve the intelligence of a UAV while performing a mission, where finding an optimal maneuver decision-making policy of the UAV has become one of the key issues when we attempt to enable the UAV autonomy. In this paper, we propose a maneuver decision-making algorithm based on deep reinforcement learning, which generates efficient maneuvers for a UAV agent to execute the airdrop mission autonomously in an interactive environment. Particularly, the training set of the learning algorithm by the Prioritized Experience Replay is constructed, that can accelerate the convergence speed of decision network training in the algorithm. It is shown that a desirable and effective maneuver decision-making policy can be found by extensive experimental results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is crucial for robots to autonomously steer in complex environments safely without colliding with any obstacles. Compared to conventional methods, deep reinforcement learning-based methods are able to learn from past experiences automatically and enhance the generalization capability to cope with unseen circumstances. Therefore, we propose an end-to-end deep reinforcement learning algorithm in this paper to improve the performance of autonomous steering in complex environments. By embedding a branching noisy dueling architecture, the proposed model is capable of deriving steering commands directly from raw depth images with high efficiency. Specifically, our learning-based approach extracts the feature representation from depth inputs through convolutional neural networks and maps it to both linear and angular velocity commands simultaneously through different streams of the network. Moreover, the training framework is also meticulously designed to improve the learning efficiency and effectiveness. It is worth noting that the developed system is readily transferable from virtual training scenarios to real-world deployment without any fine-tuning by utilizing depth images. The proposed method is evaluated and compared with a series of baseline methods in various virtual environments. Experimental results demonstrate the superiority of the proposed model in terms of average reward, learning efficiency, success rate as well as computational time. Moreover, a variety of real-world experiments are also conducted which reveal the high adaptability of our model to both static and dynamic obstacle-cluttered environments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]